Greeley theater hosts Found Footage Festival

Don’t throw out those embarrassing home movies, because that time your mom recorded you dancing to the Spice Girls in your room could end up being shown to hundreds of people.

Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett, creators of the Found Footage Fest, will host a show in Greeley on September 4th. Prueher and Pickett’s credits include “The Onion” and the “Late Show with David Letterman.” Their unique comedy show is on its tenth year. The two find obscure, forgotten VHS tapes and guide the audience through clips that they edit down.

The Beginning:

Growing up in a small Wisconsin town, Pickett and Prueher found themselves making their own entertainment by finding old VHS tapes at thrift stores.

“We would show them to friends in our parents’ living room before we even had driver’s licenses,” Prueher said. “We’d just make jokes and sit around and watch these ridiculous videos we’d find and sort of point out our favorite parts.”

They have been a team since sixth grade and roomed together at the University of Wisconsin, where they continued to collect videos.

“We started collecting in high school, really. Nick stole a McDonald’s training video. He worked at a McDonald’s in like 1992 or something. He had to watch this awful training video. You know how training videos are; everybody’s excited to clean the toilets and it was perky and happy and that’s completely unrealistic.” Pickett said. “He had to watch this one called, ‘Inside and Outside Custodial Duties’ that was so so painful. It was just insulting to actually show this to somebody. And he stole it and he brought it back with him. We watched it so many times; we got absolutely obsessed with it.”

In 2004, they decided to take the videos and accompanying jokes to a Manhattan bar and found that people enjoyed what they put together. The show has been running ever since.

Favorite Found Footage

Prueher’s favorite is a video entitled “How To Have Cybersex on the Internet.”

“It was an instructional video from 1997 about the step-by-step process of having cybersex and all this stuff, and the weird part, to us, is it didn’t know whether it wanted to be, like, sexy or instructional. As a result, it’s really neither,” Prueher said.

Pickett’s favorite is a public access video starring a man named Frank Pacholski. The two episodes of this show consisted only of Pacholski dancing in an American flag speedo and dumping food on his head.

“The weirdest part about it was that he was doing all of this for a group of like eight elderly people. So, there are eight elderly people watched this man dance around in speedos and breaking eggs on his head,” Pickett said.

What’s New:

This year, Prueher and Pickett went to extreme lengths to track down people from the videos. They even reunited two home shopping hosts from a show entitled “John and Johnny.”

“These guys were just so over-the-top obnoxious and bumbling and we just loved these guys and we wanted more,” Prueher said. “One was living in Seattle and one was living in Florida, and we wanted to reunite them; they hadn’t seen each other in 26 years. So, not only did we hire a private detective, but we spent way too much money to fly these guys to the same city.”

They recorded the reunion to play at their show.

Tickets to the show are $11 and can be purchased at http://kresscinema.com/found-footage-festival/. The show starts at 7:30 at The Kress Cinema,817 8th Ave, Greeley.

Collegian A&E Writer Cassie Maack can be reached at entertainment@collegian.com or on Twitter @maackcl.

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